Unrealism: Critical Reflections in Popular Genre Worldweave the Fact
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1 Unrealism: critical reflections in popular genre Worldweave The fact of the Weird is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth- eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged edges , things are looking at us. (Miéville 2011, 1115) Weird fiction is distinguished by its evocations of horror and through its technical differences from other popular genres. Yet it remains, in the generic differences it articulates, connected to other modes of fiction and, in its production of horrifying effects, at odds with familiar realities. The composite “worldweave” serves as a reminder that the web of words, things, feelings, customs and institutions constituting reality is neither as secure nor as unified as practical realism would have it. Weird fiction’s horror exposes holes in the representation and fabric of everyday existence: it is neither “holy” nor whole but “hole-y” (Miéville 2011, 1115). Through tears in life’s fabric, it imagines further horrors in the object-gaze of “that a- human(ist) totality that once seen can’t be unseen” (Noys and Murphy 2016, 200). Horror shreds sense, order and meaning, slashing the threads coordinating self, other, object, reality and reason. The image of the worldweave, moreover, illuminates other generic forms and effects. The uncanny, for instance, as a staple effect of gothic anxieties and fantastic hesitations, registers breaches in the fabric of things: in gothic fiction reality-testing is briefly disarrayed by irruptions of strange energies; in fantasy, tears enable departures from orders of 2 probability and rationality. While gothic gently recoils, resetting its self against tremors of haunting and hallucination, forms of fantasy find opportunities in the torn fabric, gaps permitting passage to other worlds and dimensions. “Unrealism”, marked by negativity, interruption and discontinuity, registers tears in the fabric of generic and social realities. Neither a genre in itself nor a genre-specific property, it discloses – amid fictional genres (such as romance, horror or fantasy) considered inimical to protocols of realism and naturalised habits of reality – an insubordinate disposition towards discrete and distinct forms. It acknowledges the interdependence of generic differentiations (including realism) as part of a tense and open system of classification and, further, interferes with cultural constructions of reality. From interrogations of aesthetic hierarchies and evaluations, to disturbances in the patterns of composition, expectation and reception prescribed by genre, unrealism probes the gaps and absences occluded by modes of representation whose power and effect depends upon claims of secure and unified reality. Rereading fantastic fiction as a subversive mode that (contra Todorovian structuralism) engages social and historical reserves, Rosemary Jackson notes how its “unreality” differentially interrogates the security of categories of the real and the unified, nostalgic visions of totalising, moral and hierarchical forms of fantasy (she cites C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien as examples) (1981, 2). Distinguishing differential relations of representation, Jackson’s argument draws on the “negative subjunctivity” with which Joanna Russ elaborates fantasy’s refusal and violation of the rules of reality (1995, 15-26). Inverting negative relations and activating negations in reciprocal differentiations of fiction and reality, the “un” of “unrealism” condenses negativities of generic and cultural subordination and discloses their ungrounded and incomplete structures of articulation. Unrealism’s negations are not, however, resolved in a single political view or unified position. Suspicious of the rules informing composition and expectation, especially those prescribing a single or immersive 3 perspective, unrealism also eschews occlusions of representational artifice undertaken in the interests of establishing authority on the basis of naturalised reality. Instead, prompting critical, interrogative reading, unrealism employs techniques of reflexivity, juxtaposition, discontinuity and interruption. Describing his use of “portal fantasies”, M John Harrison admits a significant departure from standard practice: access to fantasy’s “imaginary country” is blocked (Bould 2005, 329). Immersion is interrupted in line with other techniques of discontinuity (Varn and Ragahendra 2016, np). These strategies form part of a wider critique of the “fantasy culture” purveyed by neoliberalism and consumerism (Mathew 2002, np). Fantasy – fictional and real – is interrogated in other modes. The playful narrative juxtapositions of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), for example, opposes generic Victorian gothic fantasy (as the gloomy material instantiation and occlusion of commodity culture across a reality of industrial exploitation) to a more sympathetic and historically credible socialist realism. But, via a preliminary frame using a postmodernised discovered manuscript trope, the novel refuses established political opposition in a textual reflection that further entangles and interrogates relations between, and veracities of, fictional and historical discourse. Drawing attention to, rather than occluding, artifices of aesthetic and political representation, the reflexivity of the text invites active critical reading. Unrealism, then, can be distinguished as a writerly mode of narrative interruption that appears in and across popular forms of fiction often categorised as ‘unrealistic’. As reflections on genre in genre fiction, moments of unrealism draw attention to the conventions and expectations through which generic boundaries and differences are maintained. Shifting focus and register from plot to form, moreover, has the effect of unsettling habituated patterns of reading and, beyond a particular text, engendering disturbances that trouble the work of genre criticism and challenge the assumptions securing wider (ideological) delineations of fiction and reality. More than the subordinated antithesis of realism, unrealism, in the 4 argument that follows, is seen to precipitate a wider interrogation of the framing of and the instability between social, aesthetic and political differentiations of fiction, reality and fantasy: deployments of the prefix in Jacques Rancière’s political-aesthetic theory and in Sigmund Freud’s notions of the unconscious and the uncanny, disclose an extensive and disarming disruption of the underpinnings of social and subjective senses of ‘reality’. Similar disruptions manifest themselves in reflections on genre, fiction and reality in writings by M John Harrison, J G Ballard and China Miéville, offering a space to interrogate the naturalised assumptions of political and social existences suffused by media, commerce, and fantasy. As a mode that challenges unified perspectives, however, unrealism is not tied to pre-established positions: though politically indeterminate, Kazuo Ishiguro’s literary dystopia remorselessly disarms any single interpretative framework, whether historical, social or realistic. Surf Noir In Nova Swing (2006), the second of M John Harrison’s Light trilogy, there is a curious and resonant reflection on an innocuous scene in a quiet bar. A disenchanted detective, taking time to review his ongoing investigation and smoke a pipe, watches a child play on the sandy floor between cane chairs and tables. The youngster is dressed only in a t-shirt with “SURF NOIR” printed on it. The reference, quite likely alluding to the bar (“Café Surf”), prompts wider speculation: Meanings – all incongruous – splashed off this like drops of water, as the dead metaphors trapped inside the live one collided and reverberated endlessly and elastically, taking up new positions relative to one another. SURF NOIR, which is a whole new existence; which is a “world” implied in two words, dispelled in an 5 instant; which is foam on the appalling multitextual sea we drift on. “Which is probably”, Aschemann noted, “the name of an aftershave”. (2006, 27-8) Collisions of connotation and association situate the detective’s speculations in a thoroughly postmodern and poststructuralist frame wherein dehiscence from systems of meaning is seen as reflexive froth and marketing fantasies. Though consonant with other themes of the novel – the unfixing of meaning linked to quantum rewritings of the universe and the epochal rupture of economic and financial deregulation – it is anachronistic: recognisably late twentieth-century reflections occur on a distant planet four hundred years in the future. Protagonist and setting (a non-corporate commercial-criminal zone of sleazy entertainments and biotechnological experimentation echoing the “Sprawl” of William Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984]) imply a near-future cyber-hardboiled social commentary, even though, in grander SF terms, the planet has been constructed by advanced alien species to observe and exploit a massive singularity. The ring of moved or manufactured planets is nicknamed “the Beach” and the singularity’s radiation is described as surf, adding to reflexive density. Simultaneously specific and vague, the references – like the club “Tech Noir” named in James Cameron’s 1984 movie The Terminator – compose an act of self-en-genre-ing: “Surf Noir” constitutes both a reflection in fiction on genre and names itself anew in generic terms. The elision of retro-topical consideration of genres and settings and retro-tropical concerns with commercial image-making and simulation draws out the extent of the hyper-realities